Nuyorican visionary: Jorge Soto and the evolution of an Afro-Taíno aesthetic at Taller Boricua

Centro Journal

Volumn 17, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 23-41

  Ramírez, Yasmin ^a  

^a CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

Author keywords

Art; Jorge Soto; Nuyorican; Puerto Rican; Santeria; Taino

Indexed keywords

EID: 29144443953     PISSN: 15386279     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (33)

1. Holland Cotter, "A Neighborhood Nurtures Its Vibrant Cultural History," The New York Times 16 March 1998, sec. E, 3.
2. The author and artists acknowledge the exceptional contributions that Shifra Goldman and Lucy Lippard have made to Taller Boricua through their essays and lectures.
3. Jack Agüeros, "Foreword" in The Drawings of Jorge Soto Sánchez, ed., Corrine Robbins (New York: El Museo del Barrio, 1979), unpaginated inside cover.
4. Jorge Soto, "Puerto Rican Art in New York: The Aesthetic Analysis of Eleven Painters," Patricia L. Wilson (Ph.D. diss. New York University, 1984), 128-31.
5. Jorge Soto, "Biographical Sketch" in The Drawings of Jorge Soto Sánchez, ed., Corrine Robbins (New York: El Museo del Barrio, 1979), 6.
6. Ibid., 6.
7. Jorge Soto, "Artist Biographical Statement" in The Drawings of Jorge Soto Sánchez, ed. Corrine Robbins (New York: El Museo del Barrio, 1979), 9.
8. Point 7 of the Young Lords Organization 13 point program called for "a true education in Puerto Rico's Afro-Indio culture." See Palante (October 1969), 19.
9. Marcos Dimas, "Artist Statement" in Taller Alma Boricua: Reflecting on Twenty Years of the Puerto Rican Workshop: 1969-1989 (New York: El Museo del Barrio, 1990), 10.
10. Nitza Tufiño, interview by author, 11 March 2001, New York, videorecording.
11. George Brandon, Santeria from Africa to the New World: The Dead Sell Memories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).
12. Arturo Lindsay, ed., "Orishas: Living Gods in Contemporary Latino Art" in Santeria Aesthetics in Contemporary Latin America Art (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), 220.
13. An important recording that demonstrates the transition of Santería music into Latin jazz is Top Percussion (1957), which features Tito Puente with other drummers such as Mongo Santamaria and Willie Bobo.
14. The integration of Santería music into popular Latin music continues with hip hop, house and tribe music. See La India's recording "River Ocean: Love and Happiness (Yemaya and Oshun)," the Tribal LP (New York: Strictly Rhythm Records, 1994).
15. Unpaginated document found in Jorge Soto's artist file at El Museo del Barrio.
16. The saying in English can be translated as: "And your grandmother, where is she?" (author's translation).
17. Jorge Soto, "Puerto Rican Art in New York: The Asthetic Analysis of Eleven Painters," Patricia L. Wilson (Ph.D. diss. New York University, 1984), 131.
18. Ibid., 131.
19. Ibid., 131.
20. Soto's baroque imagery can be compared to the work of Carlos Raquel Rivera, whose paintings and prints of the 1960s and 1970s employ allegorical figures and magic realist symbolism to comment on contemporary Puerto Rican life.
21. Juan Flores, interview by author, 14 April 2003, New York, N.Y., digital tape recording.
22. Unpaginated typed document found in Jorge Soto's artist files at El Museo del Barrio.
23. Yasmin Ramírez, "Jorge Soto Sánchez," in Voces y Visones: Highlights from the Permanent Collection of El Museo del Barrio (New York El Museo del Barrio, 2002), 34.
24. Flores and Soto became colleagues during a year-long cultural theory reading group that Flores organized at the Center for Puerto Rican studies in 1976. The participants were drawn from various sectors of the Nuyorican arts community such as Neco Otero and Sandra María Esteves from Taller Boricua, and Petra Barreras, an administrator at the Department of Cultural Affairs who later became the fourth director of El Museo del Barrio in 1986. According to Flores the emphasis of the seminar was on applying Marx, Gramsci, and other leftist cultural theorists to examine Puerto Rican culture.
25. Robert Farris Thompson, "The Sign of the Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art and Religion in the Americas" in Flash of the Sprit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Vintage Press, 1984), 101-60.
26. Andrés Isidoro Pérez y Mena, Speaking with the Dead: Development of Afro-Latin Religion Among Puerto Ricans in the United States (New York: AMS Press, 1991). I was also informed by personal experience gleaned from practicing Bomba, Plena, Vodoo, Afro-Cuban, Brazilian and West African dance traditions and conversations with practitioners of African-Diaspora religions.
27. Marta Moreno Vega, "The Purposeful Underdevelopment of Latino and Other Communities of Color" in Voices from the Battlefront: Achieving Cultural Equity (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1998), 105.
28. Corrine Robbins, ed. The Drawings of Jorge Soto Sánchez, 1.
29. Jorge Soto's exact cause of death has not been disclosed.
30. Sandra María Esteves, "Life is a Bitch, for Jorge Soto," in Bluestown Mockingbird Mambo (Houston:Arte Público Press, 1990), 52-3.
31. Juan Flores, interview by author, 14 April 2003, New York, N.Y., digital tape recording.
32. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Johnathan Cape (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 135.
33. Juan Flores, "pueblo pueblo: Popular Culture in Time," in From Bomba to Hip Hop (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 26.